The Academic Excellence Program

An annual recognition program for faculty award winners

February 8, 2005

A few years after he joined the Illinois English Department in 1907, Stuart Pratt Sherman wrote his friend Carl Van Doren, beckoning him to join him at Illinois: “Here you are in the great heart of the country. . . . Here is the place to study and create real American literature.” Sherman, from an old New England family, with degrees from Williams and Harvard, had seemed destined for the literary circles of Boston or New York. Instead he became a national powerhouse of literary and cultural criticism from his new home base in Urbana. His friend Carl Van Doren, by contrast, and Carl’s brother Mark Van Doren, grew up in rural Illinois, graduated from the University of Illinois, and made their way east, each becoming luminaries at Columbia.

I refer to this story, which Bruce Michelson tells in his entry in No Boundaries: University of Illinois Vignettes, because it belongs to a powerful dynamic that links the University of Illinois both to its location in the American rural middle west and to its dense and complex relations to the larger world—in this instance the early twentieth century literary life of the east coast capitals of culture, but, by extension, to the great metropolitan centers, and the great centers of learning, across the world. In all fields of study, the research and scholarship performed at the University of Illinois feed into, and are nourished by, a world-wide set of connections that span the disciplines and, increasingly, cross them.

Edited by Lillian Hoddeson, No Boundaries profiles the careers of a number of illustrious Illinois faculty from early in the history of the University through the extended twentieth century invention of the modern American research university. Partly it tells the story of the prominent part Illinois has played in that invention. The book tells terrific stories about some very special people, and, in doing so, it tells much about the rich heritage out of which this banquet honoring our faculty has grown. I would like to draw on some of those stories to set the context for tonight’s recognitions.

Roger Adams, Boston-born and Harvard-educated, began his career as an assistant professor of Chemistry at Illinois in 1916. Ten years later he became department head, and stayed in that job for nearly thirty years. Among his nearly 200 doctoral students was Wallace Carothers, who was the first industrial chemist elected to the National Academy of Sciences and Wendall Stanley, who won the Noble Prize in Chemistry. When recruited by MIT and by Harvard to lead their Chemistry departments, and by the NSF to be its first director, Adams chose to stay at Illinois. He was, however, anything but a stay-at-home scholar. Under Adams’s leadership, Chemistry at Illinois became a peer of the best private universities—one of the first public research university programs to achieve such status. And he was, throughout, a cutting-edge organic chemist.

When another New Englander by birth, Nathan Ricker, graduated in 1873 from the Illinois architecture program, he was the first person to graduate from any American university architecture program. Ricker stayed on for a career in which he not only set the standard for American architectural education, but designed many new buildings for our burgeoning campus, including the first university building in America devoted to Engineering.

Born near Chicago and educated in New York, Katherine Sharp became, in 1897, the first woman (by nearly seven decades) to head a major university library. In ten years she tripled the Library’s holdings and set standards for Library Science that shaped the discipline.

When trained chemist Isabel Bevier arrived at Illinois to develop scientific rigor in what would come to be called home economics, she was at first distressed by the muddy, hill-less, boundary-less terrain, but soon came to find in the prairie’s “lack of boundaries” a metaphor for an institution that “opened up a whole new world for me.”

Opening up “whole new worlds”—for individuals engaged in research, and for countless others who benefit from their discoveries—is something the University of Illinois has a knack of doing. They certainly opened up for Nathan Newmark, who earned his Illinois doctorate in Civil Engineering, joined the faculty, and went on be chief consultant for the daring (and earthquake resistant) Latino Americana Tower, which grows out of the highly seismic earth of Mexico City. The design specifications he developed in the sixties to protect nuclear power plants and research reactors from earthquakes are still in use.

My purpose here is not simply to recite a litany of great worthies who have made the University of Illinois their home, although I do take great pleasure in contemplating the astonishing people whose achievements have made this one of the world’s premier research universities. These are familiar names. But they weren’t always familiar. These are people who came to this university on the prairie, some from nearby, some from far away, most of them young and relatively unknown when they arrived, some of them skeptical of what they would find here. But wherever they came from, in whatever field of study, and with whatever initial expectations, they brought with them great intelligence, drive, and intellectual courage; they found here an environment that nourished their remarkable talents and let them thrive; and they sent back out into the larger world the fruits of their distinguished labors.

This dynamic is basic to the world we inhabit, and cherish, at Illinois. It is basic to the stories told in No Boundaries—the rapid rise of our Library to preeminence among public universities, for example, or the flourishing of the “Photosynthesis Project” under the leadership of Robert Emerson, grandnephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Russian-born, German-educated, Eugene Rabinowitch, who had to flee Hitler’s Germany; or the development of the ILLIAC computers and the remarkable uses to which they were put, including then chemistry professor Lejaren Hiller’s ILLIAC Suite for String Quartet, the “first piece of music to be composed with the aid of a computer;” or the heroic days of making the Physics department into a world leader in pioneering solid state physics.

Indeed, for moments of sheer recognition, it is hard to imagine anything exceeding the beginning years of this century, when Tony Leggett was awarded the Noble Prize in Physics, Paul Lauterbur was awarded the Noble Prize in Medicine, Carl Woese won the Crafoord Prize, and Nick Holonyak Jr. added the National Medal of Technology to the National Medal of Science he had been awarded earlier.

But for the University, what ultimately matters is not this great moment or that, but the strength and durability of the institution, its capacity to sustain the highest levels of creativity over the long haul, and to enable strong units to reinvent themselves continuously. The University of Illinois came into prominence as a world leader over the course of the twentieth century by building on the foundations of a great nineteenth-century idea—that of the land grant university—and a compact with the state through which the University prospered. The land grant ideal has proven to be both sturdy enough and supple enough to sustain itself in the face of the enormous changes in our world between the time President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862 and we managed to enter a new millennium without all of our computers breaking down.

Without the formative and sustaining support of the State over an eventful century, the University of Illinois could not now stand up proudly as one of the great world universities. But the new century is already showing us new challenges. To meet these challenges we must re-imagine the land grant concept in terms of twenty-first century demands on it, and, working closely with our new President, we must form a new compact with the State.

The new compact will not easily be established, but its goals are essential. To pursue them is to build on our great past and our dynamic present by re-imagining the modern land grant university. The challenges of the new century will require new forms of engagement and leadership from a great public university acting in concert with the broad array of partners and stakeholders with whom its interests are deeply intertwined. Fashioning this new compact, which is in the best spirit of our traditions, can help the University to increase public support and develop new levels of private assistance to realize its goal of even greater excellence. Within the world of great public research universities, Illinois’s place is an honored one.

The stories in No Boundaries provide one way to recognize the deep and proud heritage we are honored and obligated to extend. Tonight’s recognition of awards earned by our faculty provides a splendid indicator of just how exceptionally well we are doing.

Before I finish, I would like to make one more quick visit to the stories we find in No Boundaries. When John Bardeen joined the Illinois faculty, in 1951 he was eager to leave Bell Labs, where he felt his working environment had become constricted. Having Nick Holonyak as his first graduate student must have helped convince him quickly that he had come to the right place. Five years after arriving here, Bardeen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with John Shockley and Walter Brattain, for the invention of the transistor when he had been with Bell Labs. But by then Bardeen, with his post-doc Leon Cooper and his graduate student J. Robert Schrieffer, was deep in the process of completing the theory of superconductivity. In 1972, Bardeen would share his second Noble Prize in Physics with Cooper and Schrieffer.

The kind of achievement represented by Bardeen’s example requires genius, and it requires very hard work, but it also requires an institutional environment for that work in which there is a deep compatibility between research goals and the goals of the institution. Bardeen had such an environment at Bell Labs when he and his colleagues invented the transistor. Later, when he believed his capabilities were being stifled at Bell Labs, he found a place for his kind of creativity at Illinois. This is the kind of environment we must sustain. It is an environment made possible in large part by the remarkable people recognized in this room tonight.

I saved Bardeen for last among my much-abbreviated list of Illinois stars not only because of his brilliance and his importance to the University, but because there is a sense in which Bardeen’s way of living mirrored the style of the University he came to love so much. Born in Wisconsin, this Midwesterner was inclined to understatement, especially when it came to his own achievements. According to Lillian Hoddeson, Bardeen came home on the breakthrough day in the discovery of the transistor and murmured to his wife Jane, “We discovered something today.” Years later, in his own quiet way, he informed his colleague Charlie Slichter in the halls of Loomis Lab: “Well, I think we’ve figured out superconductivity.” In the ferociously competitive world of high stakes science, who else but Bardeen would be as much relieved as overjoyed to win a second Noble Prize, never having felt quite sure he should have won the first one.

It is sometimes said that the University of Illinois doesn’t blow its own horn often or loudly enough, that the campus, even, has never quite internalized an adequate conviction of its remarkable strengths and qualities as one of the world’s leading research institutions. After recognizing many of our most distinguished and productive faculty tonight, I feel certain you are as convinced as I am that we have earned the right to brag more than a little. I am honored to be a part of this great place. Thank you.